Universal Backs Free Music Rival to iTunes

[theknife]

For consumers, SpiralFrog’s free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple’s paid ones do. Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements, and will be prevented by special software from making copies of the songs they download or from sharing them with other people.

They will have to revisit the SpiralFrog web site monthly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in Microsoft’s WMA format, meaning they will not work on Apple iPod portable music players.

they've managed to combine all the worst elements of the digital music biz model into one package. i think free may not be enough - they may have to actually pay people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/bu...artner =MYWAY